12 ways to ruin your referral programme

Referral marketing is the fastest-growing form of customer acquisition – so much so that it’s becoming increasingly hard to find a successful brand which doesn’t operate some kind of refer-a-friend scheme.

It’s also fundamentally simple: your existing fans and customers are rewarded for telling their friends about you, those friends are incentivised to shop, everyone’s happy.

But, just because referral’s simple, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a number of things that can go badly awry. Sidestepping these pitfalls is easy (especially if you select a referral platform designed to avoid them), but you need to know where to look.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to show you in the slides below, citing examples where some brands have stumbled into these pitfalls while others have safely avoided them. Let’s go…